GUEST SPEAKER - JANE HOUSE

At the class of last day we had a guest speaker, Jane House, who is a published author of children's material. She told us some things related to materials writing and talked to us about experiential learning, communicative methodology and CLIL, which approach to language learning. 

Experiential learning: it is recommendable to try to make learning experiential for children, for example personalizing it; dealing with something that can identify them, something they are related to. Jane also told us that it is very important that a book is physically appealing, so that it doesn't make lessons boring.

It is also useful to include tasks in which children need the language, not just studying the words. For example, they can use the language by writing a poem. And there are many reasons to incorporate for children reading other poems, like learning new vocabulary or guessing what the poem speaks about. Reading it aloud once written is good, but if the children write it alone, then the classmates will have to listen to 30 poems and will get bored. If they do it in groups, the classmates will only have to listen to 4 or 5 poems.

Communicative methodology: treating the text in a communicative way. It is important to mix the treatment of the text as a vehicle for information (TAVI) and as a language object (TALO); to find the information that the text gives and also to focus on the language that it contains in order to study English.

She showed us different kinds of text, fictional and non-fictional, that a book can include: stories, daily routines, instructions, e-mails, news, poems, maps, dialogs or postcards, for example.

CLIL: Content and Language Integrating Learning. It means teaching a subject, such as Mathematics or Science, in English. The coursebooks in our country use to have CLIL pages instead of being a complete CLIL book, because it is difficult to do CLIL in a country where English is not so usually spoken. But with CLIL you can include some lessons of a subject in English.

During the speaking we were shown a coursebook to see how CLIL was included in it. Each book in the series had 9 units; an opening unit to review (unit 0) and eight more units. Every unit was organized in an introduction of the unit theme, a vocabulary lesson, a grammar lesson, CLIL lessons (for example a Geography and an Arts lesson) and a writing lesson.

The authors of that book tried to make it attractive for the pupils, enjoyable and from the real world. The book also allowed pupils to produce something to learn.

At the end of the speaking, Jane House told us about the teacher's books. The coursebook came with one, which is dedicated to teachers. In that book they give you a structure of how to plan your lesson, which will be really useful for us, as future teachers, if we want to take profit of the activities of the book.